Update: 1107 signatures as of 2pm on Sat Dec 3

Senate faculty and lecturers of the University of California:

The below letter — written by a group of UC faculty — will be delivered to California state leaders the week after Thanksgiving. Please fill out the below form to add your name and affiliation to the letter. If you have questions about the letter, please email: markowitz@gseis.ucla.edu and graeme.blair@ucla.edu

To: Governor Gavin Newsom; Senate President Pro Tempore Toni G. Atkins; Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon; and Senate and Assembly reps for each of the ten UC campuses

RE: A call to encourage fair bargaining by the University of California with striking academic workers, and for a renewal of investment in UC by the State of California

The University of California (UC) system contributes to state economic growth, promotes the health of its citizens, informs state policy innovation, and builds social mobility.

The UC system is the top-rated public higher education system in the country: six of the top ten public universities are UCs, including #1. These schools educate the next generation of California thinkers, artists, and leaders. Each year UC grants 62,000 BA degrees and trains over 15,000 health workers, over 70% of whom stay in California. UC teachers empower their students to become the kind of engaged citizens and critical thinkers who are desperately needed, particularly as our country faces significant challenges to longstanding democratic principles. UCs also create economic mobility. Nearly 40% of UC students are the first in their families to attend college, and 37% are from families with low incomes. UC support of these students enables the ideas, skills, and talents of diverse Californians to flourish, and opens new doors for innovation. Of the top 20 universities driving social mobility in the U.S., five are UCs.

UC researchers focus on critical California problems, from preventing wildfires to reducing homelessness, and regularly deliver insights and inventions that improve the lives of Californians. UC institutes, including the California Policy Lab, the Latino Policy and Politics Institute, Policy Analysis for California Education, and the Climate Impact Lab, generate and translate research to inform the decisions of civil servants, elected officials, and policymakers.  UC also holds 11,000 active patents — the most of any university — and UC innovations have helped launch almost 1,500 companies. The wetsuit, the cochlear implant, plug-in hybrid technology, cancer immunotherapy, CRISPR genome editing, and high-efficiency blue LED light were all invented at UC campuses. 

UC contributions to California would be impossible without the labor of graduate student teaching and research assistants, postdoctoral scholars, and staff researchers. 

Graduate student teaching assistants enable UC to educate California’s future workforce. The scale of UC education — 230,000 undergraduate students annually — makes graduate student teaching essential. Graduate student researchers, postdoctoral scholars, and staff researchers also fuel UC’s research discoveries. They staff labs, draft grant applications, recruit participants, monitor experiments, and analyze data. Research shows that the main difference between universities with high and low research output is access to excellent graduate students. 

Graduate students also play a crucial role in diversifying UC. Research shows that representation in the classroom — seeing “people like you” behind the lectern — promotes student learning and that diversifying research teams increases innovation. UC graduate students look increasingly diverse – like Californians as a whole. Students are 5% Black, 12% Latinx, 0.7% Indigenous, 0.4% Pacific Islander, and 19.6% Asian, whereas Californians are 5% Black, 40% Latinx, 0.8% Indigenous, 0.4% Pacific Islander, and 15% Asian. 

UC wages and benefits for graduate students, postdocs, and academic researchers are unlivable, harm mental health, and diminish capacity for research and teaching.

The monthly wage for both graduate student workers and postdoctoral researchers is eclipsed by fair market housing and childcare costs across all UC campuses. For graduate students — who are restricted by UC policy to part-time work, and therefore beholden to their UC wages — the situation is more dire. At UC Santa Barbara, for example, HUD’s “fair market rent”, defined as the 40th percentile of rents for a 1-bedroom apartment, is $385 over graduate student monthly wages. On every campus, the combined cost of fair market rent for a 1-bedroom and childcare for an infant or preschooler exceeds the monthly wage. As a result, students sleep in cars, take second and third jobs to make ends meet, and live far from campus so they can afford housing. Nine in ten UC graduate students are “rent burdened,” spending over 30% of their income on housing. A quarter have experienced food insecurity and 4% have experienced homelessness (11% at UC Santa Cruz). Postdocs fare only slightly better. 

These poverty wages have been a concern of UC faculty for decades, and evidence suggests they meaningfully harm workers’ mental health. As early as 2012, UC faculty began raising the alarm about graduate student funding in particular. Though “the achievements, prestige, and international renown of the University… would not be possible without” the work of doctoral students, the current wages have led to “a strikingly high prevalence of anxiety and depression among academic graduate students” (2017 report). Students have only become worse off in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and recent inflation. This is particularly true for students who do not come from backgrounds that include generational wealth. For international students, who are critical to research competitiveness, survival on a UC salary is even more difficult because they do not have access to many resident benefits.

Neither the existing UC wages, nor the current proposed increase, are competitive with peer institutions, threatening UC’s ability to bring in the best and brightest, and undermining its contributions to Californians.

In a 2018 accountability report, we warned that funding at UC campuses for students is far lower than peer institutions. A 2019 study called more vociferously for an improvement in UC graduate funding, noting that “without a targeted effort to address graduate student housing, UC’s capacity to attract and retain qualified candidates is at serious risk.” 

This threat has grown in recent years as in response to the mobilization of graduate student workers around the country, wages at peer institutions are increasing. For example, Columbia University's graduate student salaries recently increased from $23,000 — comparable to UC — to $39,000. Leading public institutions have raised salaries as well. At the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, the starting salary for graduate students is $23,196. While comparable nominally, adjusted for cost-of-living Michigan’s salary is nearly twice that of salaries at UC San Francisco (equivalent to $46,462). Indeed, a 2017 UC survey suggested that  a nontrivial proportion of graduate students chose alternative institutions due to compensation and cost of living issues, even when the UC program was preferred. 

The UAW, representing striking workers, demands a large wage increase, better childcare benefits, free transit access, equal treatment of international workers, and regularized job security. We ask you to urge UC to bargain in good faith and meet the UAW requests. 

The cost of the proposed changes would likely be significant: UAW and UC estimates are several hundred million dollars annually. The UC leadership has said it cannot make these changes within its current budget, without systematic changes. We agree: systematic changes are needed from UC. We also think big changes are needed from state leaders.

To meet the moment, we ask that the State reinvest in its flagship education institution.

Today’s California higher education system was forged in the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, led by Clark Kerr, and enshrined in the Donahoe Higher Education Act by the state legislature. The inclusive dream of the Master Plan was to “guarantee that there would be a place in college for every high school graduate,” with the UCs training professionals, professors, and the top students tuition-free, including transfers from Cal State and community colleges.

The mission of the University of California as a public university, for Californians, is alive, and has been a priority for this legislature and administration: we celebrate your efforts to increase funding for the UC in recent sessions, reversing a 20-year decline of nearly 40%. Nonetheless, California remains underinvested relative to the year 2000. We urge you to keep going. Reinvestment in the UCs and the tenants of the Master Plan could be achieved at a low cost to taxpayers, and reap enormous benefits – for current and future generations of Californians.

Regards,

[signatories]

CC: UC President Michael V. Drake; Richard Leib, Chair, UC Board of Regents; Gene D. Block, Chancellor, UCLA; Carol T. Christ, Chancellor, UC Berkeley; Howard Gillman, Chancellor, UC Irvine; Sam Hawgood, Chancellor, UC San Francisco; Pradeep K. Khosla, Chancellor, UC San Diego; Cynthia K. Larive, Chancellor, UC Santa Cruz; Gary S. May, Chancellor, UC Davis; Juan Sánchez Muñoz, Chancellor, UC Merced; Kim A. Wilcox, Chancellor, UC Riverside; Henry T. Yang, Chancellor, UC Santa Barbara